Detect Apple silicon on Mac OS

[ArianeBouchardConformit]

Enter your suggestions in details:

On the install page for Node.js (https://nodejs.org/en/download), in the installer area, these are the options I get selected by default:

It selects x64 by default.

However, this is a Macbook with an M4 family chip. Ideally, it should recommend ARM64 by default.

[bmuenzenmeyer]

FWIW, this does work on a Macbook Pro with a Apple M2 Max

[ljharb]

On a MacBook Air M4, it still says x64, ftr.

[bmuenzenmeyer]

Browser? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NavigatorUAData/getHighEntropyValues#browser_compatibility

[ljharb]

Always Safari :-)

A Chrome-only feature isn't part of the web and shouldn't be used.

[ovflowd]

I'm unfamiliar of other ways of automatically verifying you're on Apple Sillicon.

[aduh95]

I'm unfamiliar of other ways of automatically verifying you're on Apple Sillicon.

We should probably use ARM64 as fallback instead of x64 at this point; according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_transition_to_Apple_silicon#2025, there's only one year left of support for non-ARM macs, which are now in the minority.

[ovflowd]

Absolutely makes sense to me :)

[ArianeBouchardConformit]

I'm unfamiliar of other ways of automatically verifying you're on Apple Sillicon.

I was going to say that the user agent should contain that info, but then I went into my console and ran navigator.userAgent and got this.

"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:144.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/144.0"

I maybe expected that the info would be missing, but not that it would explicitly lie about the OS version and the architecture.

[ovflowd]

I'm unfamiliar of other ways of automatically verifying you're on Apple Sillicon.

I was going to say that the user agent should contain that info, but then I went into my console and ran navigator.userAgent and got this.

"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:144.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/144.0"

I maybe expected that the info would be missing, but not that it would explicitly lie about the OS version and the architecture.

User Agents absolutely do not have that information. That's why there are specs such as NavigatorUAData to complement it in a secure fashion.

I maybe expected that the info would be missing, but not that it would explicitly lie about the OS version and the architecture.

Many browsers do NOT update User Agent information anymore. Just to double check as you did not fill our bug issue template, what browser are you using? I assume it is Firefox due to the UA?

[ArianeBouchardConformit]

I'm unfamiliar of other ways of automatically verifying you're on Apple Sillicon.

We should probably use ARM64 as fallback instead of x64 at this point; according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_transition_to_Apple_silicon#2025, there's only one year left of support for non-ARM macs, which are now in the minority.

Another reasonable alternative might be to not set a default at all and force people to select an option.

[ovflowd]

I'm unfamiliar of other ways of automatically verifying you're on Apple Sillicon.

We should probably use ARM64 as fallback instead of x64 at this point; according to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_transition_to_Apple_silicon#2025, there's only one year left of support for non-ARM macs, which are now in the minority.

Another reasonable alternative might be to not set a default at all and force people to select an option.

Setting a default works in an optimistic way. It's still up to you to decide what to do with the information presented to you. Just because your use case doesn't work, doesn't mean we should strip that from everyone. Keep in mind Chromium-based browsers are still 80%+ of the market, so your suggestion would be stripping something that is prefectly working for possibly 80% of our audience.

[ArianeBouchardConformit]

Oh no, to reword, I mean: Not pre-selecting an option when the architecture can't be determined because the browser doesn't support it.

Of course you could pre-select an option when you do know which architecture it is.